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Summary: On March 1, 2013, Crowdbooster’s currently free service will be replaced by a paid subscription at $9 a month. Below we explain how we arrived at this decision and how it affects you.

Dear Crowdbooster users,

We have recently made the very difficult decision to discontinue Crowdbooster’s free service and replace it with a paid subscription at $9 a month starting on March 1, 2013. We understand that this is going to create problems for those of you who rely on Crowdbooster. To help you through this transition, we want to offer discounts, help you look for free alternatives, and give you time to explore the new Crowdbooster. We hope to continue our journey together.

What does this mean for you if you are a free user?

Your current free service will be discontinued on March 1, 2013. If you don’t take action, your account will simply be deactivated on March 1. Please be assured that you will not be charged.

Between now and March 1, 2013, you will enjoy an extended trial period with all features of the paid service to avoid interruption and let you evaluate our offering.

We are offering a special discounted pricing as our way of saying thank you for supporting us over the last two and a half years. The discounts are:

20% off your monthly / annual rate if you subscribe to any plan during the month of January* (~4 months of savings).

10% off your monthly / annual rate if you subscribe to any plan during the month of February*.

*Either way, you will not be billed until March 1, and we encourage you to subscribe in January to lock in the lower rate.

You will get a better Crowdbooster with data export and much more to come. This change is coming on the eve of a major redesign to Crowdbooster with improvements across the board. Today, we are also announcing a completely new export feature to help you take Crowdbooster to Excel and share your insights more easily. This is an example of what you have to look forward to as a paid subscriber.

The cost of supporting free users has taken a toll on us. As Crowdbooster has become mission-critical to many of you, we started falling behind on our promise to give you the highest quality service and we hated it. Instead of the unsustainable freemium model, we’ve decided to charge a low monthly price of $9 for the currently free service. This freedom will allow us to innovate faster (like our new export feature) and provide you an even better service. We firmly believe great analytics can make a big difference in how we learn to communicate and tell stories using social media. If you’ve enjoyed Crowdbooster over the last two and a half years, we hope you’d consider purchasing a plan. As always, we welcome your comments and are committed to making Crowdbooster great for you.

Thoughts? Tweet @Crowdbooster. Send us a message on Facebook. Email Ricky from Crowdbooster at ricky@crowdbooster.com or give him a call at +1 (888) 960-6018. He will also be responding to all of you who have been giving us feedback over the last week about this change.

Looking for free alternatives? We’ve started a Google Doc right here to help you out.

I think the new CrowdBooster is great especially for reports and graphs. The problem I see is the price point. With Hootsuite offering quite a lot in their free account and only $9.99 for a Pro account, CB’s free version features might not be enough for users to switch to paid accounts. I wish you guys all the best! Looking forward to seeing what new features you come out with!

Apparently I’m late to this game, but I’m very sorry to hear that you’ll no longer offer a free version. Yes, I understand that everything’s expensive. But everyone else wants $9 a month, too.And some of us haven’t yet "boosted our crowd" enough to have a chance at bringing in revenue.Unfortunately, something’s gotta give.

I am a regular user from twitter and am just amazed at how crowdbooster’s analytics work. I don’t promote anything and tweeting does not give me any monetary benefit. But the 9 dollars per month is too heavy for me.I hope there’s more discount plans for personal, non-commercial use.